


artificial sunlight

by yugto



Category: Kagerou Project
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-24
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2018-02-06 02:12:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1840543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yugto/pseuds/yugto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While Shintaro's sleeping, Ene goes on a local cyber journey.</p>
            </blockquote>





	artificial sunlight

It’s only eight in the evening, but Shintaro is already fast asleep, a faint trickle of drool spilling from the corner of his mouth.

From the computer screen, Ene watches Shintaro sleep, crossing her arms and puffing her cheeks up in boredom. Normally, she'd yell to get his attention, blare a siren at the highest volume through his speakers, do _something_ to awaken him just for the fun of it. However, he's gotten a total of two hours of sleep over the past two days, and this sole fact prevents her from suddenly blasting hard rock through his speakers. She's not being nice or anything! It's just that messing with him isn't quite as fun when he just blinks blearily at her, like she's some sort of fatigue-induced hallucination. Even threatening to post his secret folders on the internet hadn't done anything to him—he'd just slumped over on the keyboard, in a posture that screamed _I am so done with today_ , and fallen asleep moments later.

So, unable to annoy her master at the moment, the program busies herself for a while “organizing” Shintaro’s computer. She resaves all his open files with stupid filenames, takes screencaps of herself making faces and sneaks them into his secret folders, moves certain files from folder to folder, password-locks a dirty file or two, and leaves a bright blue sticky note on his desktop reading _Ene was here xoxoxo_. Pausing for a minute, she surveys her work, then appends a cutesy (❁´◡`❁)*✲ﾟ* to the sticky note for effect.

Wreaking havoc with Shintaro’s files can only keep her entertained for so long, and so Ene perches on an open window, pondering her next course of action. The computer’s microphone picks up a snore. Shintaro won’t notice if she disappears from his computer for a few minutes, so Ene moves on to her next preferred activity: sightseeing.

There isn’t much to see. The webcam on the computer can only show her so much: the neatly folded (unused) clothing in the closet, a window overlooking the suburban neighborhood outside, the unmade bed, three slices of cold pizza and ten empty cans of soda, two bags of rabbit food on the floor, the fluffy rabbit that regards her with an uninterested air, and last and most definitely least, the pathetic loser whose drool is spilling onto the keyboard. Ene catalogues all these objects with a bored glance, itemizes them in order of importance, deletes the list in a fit of boredom mere moments afterward.

A brief trip to the phone charging in the corner of the room provides her with no better of a view; the two cameras on the phone give her a blurry, up-close view of the wooden dresser and a bland and uninteresting view of the ceiling. A trip to the camera on Momo's phone finds Momo singing her heart out, practicing one of her newest hits. Nothing out of the ordinary is happening in the Kisaragi household. Back to the computer it is, then.

Turning her back on the sleeping boy, the program darts one last glance over her shoulder, purses her lips and pulls up an internet browsing window. A few taps of her fingers turn the session into a private one, so Shintaro won't be able to see the results of her searches. This being done, she keys in the web address of a search site and pulls up images of the town she hasn't seen for so long.

The cyber girl relies on the internet to be her window into the outside world. It's a biased window, yes; their town is small, and rarely makes it into the news, so she's forced to check the various social media sites to see the ways in which the town has changed since she became a virus. She scrutinizes a particularly pretty snapshot of the swing set at a local park, posted by some teenage Instasnaps user; a girl and boy are swinging gently back and forth, caught up in conversation, while a single cat winds its way between them. In the background, other children are running around in what looks like a game of tag, and a small gaggle of mothers survey their children fondly. The picture is overlaid with a filter Ene identifies as KPro II.

A hesitant look at Shintaro through the webcam follows; when he doesn't stir, she presses herself so closely to the photo that she fancies the pixels of her cybernetic form can merge with the pixels that comprise the photograph. If she uses her imagination, she can pretend she's outside, feeling the warmth of the sun on her face and the bark chips beneath her feet, smelling the scent of freshly cut grass, hearing the voices of young children laughing and yelling.

After two years trapped inside a computer, it’s a little bit hard to imagine the things that she can hardly remember. Even when she was alive, she wasn’t all too fond of going outside, making it even harder to recall what the sun felt like on her skin or how the grass smelled when someone cut it. Still, she tries her best.

Shintaro's guilty pleasure is dirty pictures. Ene has no interest in such things: her guilty pleasure is these rare evenings, where Shintaro sleeps deeply and she can pretend she's alive again, if just for a moment.

The hours fly by as she flies around the internet, immersing herself in photographs and videos of the little town that has grown so much in the past two years. Facebook proves to be a good source of pictures, after she spends all of two seconds getting past their security protocols. There’s even a new shopping center downtown, with an amusement park! She’s about to check out the pictures when Shintaro stirs and blinks groggily at the computer screen.

Ene gasps, zooming dramatically toward the screen so that her surprised face obscures everything behind her. Her pixelated legs flail behind her for a few agonizing seconds, finally making contact with the red **X** in the corner of the internet window. It closes, sliding offscreen with a _shhhhh_ inaudible to anyone but Ene, and she breathes a silent sigh of relief, plastering a grin onto her face. “Good morning, Master! You’re awake early! I was planning a surprise for you for later!”

“Mmmphgf,” says Shintaro, with the natural eloquence of a freshly-woken teenage boy. It’s only a bit past three in the morning, but he’s gotten seven hours of sleep, so Ene figures she can return to annoying him as per usual. She resets the disaster alarm for three in the morning on the next day, August fourteenth, and turns her attention back to needling Shintaro.

“Ah, Master drooled _all over_ the keyboard while he was sleeping. So disgusting!” she chirps.

Shintaro ignores her, as he’s wont to do these days, and shuffles away from his keyboard to pick up the sandwich that was left outside his door for dinner the previous night. With the sandwich in his mouth and a fresh can of soda in his hand, he pulls up his music-making program and starts laying out notes and rhythms, a glint of inspiration in his eye.

“Maybe this’ll sell,” he mumbles, ignoring Ene completely.

Ene rolls her eyes and darts around the screen, pulling up windows of her own to check what the weather’s going to be like today. Today looks like it’s shaping up to be another boring day stuck inside the Kisaragi house. Maybe one of these days she’ll finally get Shintaro to take her outside; until then, she’ll have to stick with her evenings of artificial sunlight.

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting around on my computer for months, so I finally got my life together and finished it up. Episode 11 of MCA ruined me, so I needed to write something happy. 
> 
> (Well. Happier, anyway.)


End file.
